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Feature: No limit on complexity
This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, SpyParty [official site]. If Chris Hecker was going to make a mistake with SpyParty, he wanted it to be the opposite mistake to the one Spore made. The way Hecker sees it, Spore’s problem was that it was all accessibility and no depth.…
Feature: Trust no one
Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which we explore the wilds of early access. This week, Fraser's pretending to be an NPC, badly, in the asymmetric game of spies and snipers, SpyParty. How do you get blood out of a tux? Nerves already shot, I extract myself from the conversation I’m using as cover and head towards the golden statue, my prize. This plush…
Good things come to those who wait, and everyone I've talked to who has been lucky enough to try Chris Hecker's SpyParty has plenty of complimentary things to say about the 1v1 multiplayer game of social infiltrator vs observant sniper. Think you can spot a single human player in the middle of a crowd of AI entities? Hold your breath, because you've only got one…
Feature: More Poker than Go
Embracing the bluff: how SpyParty’s long development changed the game
Chris Hecker has been working on SpyParty for almost a decade now and I get the impression he'd be happy perfecting it for the rest of his career. Some developers want to move from one project to the next, an internal clock ticking down and reminding them how few ideas can be realised in a lifetime, while others are better suited to exploring one design…
The fascinating 1v1 sniper vs. spy game SpyParty will enter Steam Early Access on April 12th, creator Chris Hecker has announced, bringing it to a a wider audience after years of coveted betas and its own early access scheme. SpyParty players have developed devious tricks of deception and detection over these years, so I'll be fascinated to see what happens as fumbling newbies arrive, myself…
Feature: Listen to our name-dropping
♪♫ When you go to San Fraaaanciscooo, be sure to wear a lanyard with ‘Media’ inscribed on it round youuur nnnneck ♪♫ That’s what Adam, John and Brendan sang to each other as they gleefully skipped through the streets of California’s tram-infested hill city. The crew were in town for the yearly Game Developer's Conference where they spoke to developers, played games, and gambled on…
SpyParty is coming to Steam early access after 8 years of development
The first time SpyParty was mentioned here was in 2010, and we’ve not written about it since 2015, so you could be forgiven for forgetting that it existed. But it does indeed still exist, and after eight years of development, it's coming to Steam early access. There's a new trailer below that breaks down the simple but seductive premise.
SpyParty [official site] - Chris Hecker's game about blending in with AI lest you reveal yourself as a dirty human and are assassinated - is due to get an update at the end of the week. It's called The Not-Strictly Ballroom Update and contains a revamped (it's a makeover on the level of Clueless's Tai) map and additions to the cast of characters.
Feature:
SpyParty [official site] - that reverse Turing test of a game where you have to disappear into a party of AI characters, dodging suspicion as a fellow player armed with a single sniper bullet scans for tells - has now unveiled its third group of characters. Amongst the group are 40-something rocker Ms L, Sikh gentleman Mr K and a pair of doctorate-holding identical twins.…
Sometimes you see a phrase and it's like you don't know how your vocabulary has functioned without it for so long. Today Chris Hecker's blog (you know – him off Spy Party) introduced me to to the term "l'esports d'escalier". It came into his life via a tweet by a chap called Matthew R.F. Balousek and he's taken it to mean that moment when you…
Feature: High-frequency Hair-dos
Excellent and terrifying human behaviour sim SpyParty is still in development. I know this because party host Chris Hecker sent an invite to the RPS inbox, asking if we wanted to see the new art for the game. It would be an exclusive soiree just for us. I dressed for the occasion, meaning I put on clothes, and prepared my notebook with all the questions…
SpyParty fits into a rather small list of games with the header "stuff I read about in PC Gamer for about thirty years but never actually tried" and also the "games Craig Pearson rather likes" one. They're similar lists. For the unfamiliar, it's a one-on-one espionage deal that pits a spy at a party against an onlooking sniper who most identify them before they can…
Sometimes glitches and bugs are more than mere annoyances. Sometimes they're joyful farce, as in Soldner. Sometimes they turn patch notes into a kind of poetry. Sometimes, as in the SpyParty video below, they're shrieking nightmare fuel that will keep you awake at night for weeks to come.
I think part of the fear I had over playing Spy Party rested on the graphics. I might have overcome the horror of attempting the delicately balanced multiplayer if the characters were welcoming and not blank-faced Doctor Who monsters from the planet Do Not Want. That is a problem that Chris Hecker has been working on for some time, and now we can finally see…
Feature: I Spy Myself
There are times when the RPS Action News Team 3000 is just too busy. Like that time I missed posting about Half-Life 3's secret crowd-funding effort because I was cleaning the bath (it failed, btw). At those moments, when developers are emailing us exclusives and wiring money to our Swiss bank accounts, we just want the developer to step-up and do the job for us.…
Feature: I Spy (Party)
If Spy Party developer Chris Hecker were to look back over the game's connection logs from the past year, he might notice some strange behaviour. He'd see me arriving, spending a minute in the lobby, then disconnecting. This pattern would be repeated a few times. It wasn't a technical problem, Chris. Don't go bug-hunting. Those cold digits spilling over your screen as you search for…
Like most people, I remember the day I first started lusting after Spy Party. It was long before the lengthy, fairly exclusive closed beta, new look, and (I'm pretty sure) my own birth, but I'll never forget it. But now - finally, mercifully, joyously - anybody can play. Me, you, an especially deceptive Toucan - whoever. All you need is $15 and the steely resolve…
Spy Party! Come here. You're taking far too long about this, and I've a mind to give your ear a right old clipping. Oh, what's that, you've been busy working on a brand new, completely overhauled and really rather fetching 'illustrative' look? Well, alright, I'll let you off this time though. Just this once mind, and you're still going to bed with supper tonight.
SpyParty remains one of the most fascinating propositions in indie gaming, but it's perhaps not all that clear from the outside how the game plays out. Fortunately for the SpyParty-oblivious, Indiegames have spotted that Mr Hecker has posted a tutorial video for his early-access beta folk, and that gives us a good impression of the game's systems, as well as an idea of how to…
Chris Hecker has posted over on the SpyParty blog to explain his early-access beta pricing for the game of spy-spotting. "$15 gets you access to the beta SpyParty and all the updates during the beta, access to the private beta website, which includes forums for announcements, finding games, and discussing strategies, and eventually a bug/feature tracking system," says Hecker. He's also allow the truly excited…
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